Some ad agencies are beginning to see that ageism is a lose-lose situation: they lose great & seasoned talent, their clients lose great & seasoned talent.

Ageism is as corrosive as sexism, racial bias, religious bias and every other bias. It is just harder to prove so we need to fight harder to eradicate it. If you want to download a PDF of the article, click this link. If you have a story --positive or negative-- share it at info@yourgreymatters.org

This is the kind of BS we need to fight

I can't remember who was the New York mayor who said "fix the windows" as a solution to the endemic problem of vandalism on the subway cars. But, if you are exposed to this kind of cliche BS, respond. Don't let it just fester. Seek Matthew out in LinkedIn and let him know that it is not OK to insult an entire generation in such a mindless, stupid way.

We are absolutely floored by JLO's performance in the LIV SB...

Yes, she's 50 and she's amazing. But... one is not enough and she can't be the ONLY standard we use to measure women over 50... or people over 50 in general. We need everyone to recognize that our contributions at 50+ include our expertise, willingness to work hard and, yes, experience.

We salute JLO... but let's make everyone aware: Ageism is as corrosive as any other bias. However, its much more invisible. Let's fight it.

We will make our message simple and our voice heard

Age discrimination is as illegal and corrosive as all other discriminations. A person doesn't have to justify their age pretty much the way we don't have to justify our gender, religion, sexual orientation or skin color. All mindless discrimination is bad. Age happens to be illegal too. Fight back, make your voice heard!

In spite of talent shortages, the tech industry refuses to hire older workers.

Click on the picture to download a PDF from the WSJ article

Normally, we would link directly to the article, but the WSJ has a very inconsistent paywall. In spite of the WSJ making this important article open to the public, and just in case it again decides to close the paywall, we are bringing it to you as a PDF.

These firefighters in Queensland (Australia) are over 70... and doing a hell of a job!

For a link to the CNN article, click on the picture above

What will you be doing when you're 70?

For most people, the answer probably isn't fighting fires. But for 71-year-old John Foster, retirement was just the start of a brave new venture. John Foster and a team of volunteers from the Woodgate Rural Fire Brigade are battling a bushfire in Queensland. Foster and the rest of his six-member team from Woodgate Rural Fire Brigade are battling a fierce bushfire in Australia — and they're all over the age of 70.

"Some call us Dad's Army. We don't mind," Foster said in a Facebook post Thursday. "Let's say we are all between 70 and 74. We do this because we believe, I guess, in supporting the community," Foster told CNN on Friday.

To read the entire article in the BBC website, please click on the image

In 1960, those older than 65 made up just 4.9% of the global population, but by 2050, they’ll account for a staggering 17%.

According to a recent study by the United States Bureau of Labor Statistics, by 2026, more than one in 10 workers will be older than 75, double the rate in 1996. Roughly 3 in 10 workers will be between 65 and 74

Studies show that the majority of elderly people have faced age discrimination, either on the job or in job applications. A 2018 report by AARP, a US-based not-for-profit for retirees, found that 61% of the older workers it surveyed had seen or experienced age discrimination.

In 2016, Nicole Maestas, an expert in healthcare policy at Harvard Medical School, conducted a major research with colleagues from the RAND Corporation

It’s tempting to attribute economic and productivity slow-downs to the fact that older people are past their best, but “it doesn’t necessarily follow that older workers are less productive than younger workers”, says Maestas. In fact, she thinks the reasons underlying this trend are the opposite of what the stereotypes would suggest; the problem might not be that baby boomer workers are older and therefore less competent now, but that the ones who are leaving the workforce are still impressively productive.

And, contrary to popular belief, there is no conclusive evidence to suggest that older workers are inherently less productive. One 2018 study didn’t find any significant links between the overall performance of private sector organizations in the UK and the proportion of older workers that they employed.

Maestas suggests some alternative explanations:

The first is that, as skilled older workers leave the economy, younger ones inevitably replace them – and the youngest workers in society aren’t necessarily the most productive. As a report for the Centre for European Economic Research suggests, this is likely to have more of an impact on the sectors that require more acquired knowledge, such as manufacturing.

The second is even more intriguing: the most productive members of society tend to be wealthier, and better at planning for their retirement. As more of these older workers are able to leave, the least productive workers are left behind.

Finally, older and younger workers are thought to have skillsets that complement each other. It’s well-established that mixed-age teams can be more productive than those which are less age-diverse. It’s possible that as the most experienced workers retire, the loss of this collaborative dynamic is reducing productivity.

According to a 2015 report for the UK government by the pensions expert and political campaigner Ros Altmann, holding on to workers for just three years beyond when they would usually retire could add £55 billion to the British economy.

As if that weren’t reason enough, the evidence suggests that retaining older workers would also have the benefit of boosting the wages and employment prospects of younger generations, too. The idea is that if more older people stay in work, they’ll have more money to spend, and this benefits the economy, which is good for everyone.

Pay for everything using your credit card. If you fall for a scam, remember that you can dispute the charge with your credit card company and that they can reverse the charges. So, pay with credit card, keep all your correspondence in writing and, if needed, dispute the charges with your credit card company.

To read the entire article (and you should) click on the picture above.

Age discrimination is real and will affect you.

Tens of thousands of workers say that even with the right qualifications for a job, they are repeatedly turned away because they are over 50, or even 40, and considered too old.

But as cases make their way to court, the legal road for proving age discrimination, always difficult, has only roughened. Recent decisions by federal appeals courts in Chicago and Atlanta have limited the reach of anti-discrimination protections and made it even harder for job applicants to win.

Workers over 50 — about 54 million Americans — are now facing much more precarious financial circumstances, a legacy of the recession.

In one of the most comprehensive studies, résumés were sent out on behalf of more than 40,000 fictitious applicants of different ages for thousands of low-skill jobs like janitors, administrative assistants and retail sales clerks in 12 cities. In general, the older they were, the fewer callbacks they got.

Those in their 60s “never do better, and often do worse,” than those a decade or two younger, said David Neumark, an economics professor at the University of California, Irvine, who oversaw the research.

It is toughest for women, who suffer more age discrimination than men starting in their 40s, the researchers found. “The evidence of age discrimination against women kind of pops out in every study,” Mr. Neumark said.

There are roughly 50 million women 55+ in the U.S. While it is totally laudable that 4 are "cool" and many more are still active and vibrant, the reality for women 55+ is even harsher than the reality for men 55+. Ageism is the silent, last bias that we must fight.

The disparity comes down to bargaining power, CNBC reports. Older Americans with limited retirement savings have less of a financial cushion to fall back on, and employers know it. Also, many senior workers are less willing or able to move cities for work, further limiting their options.The CNBC ReportOlder workers haven’t seen a raise. Here’s why

Weekly earnings for workers aged 55 to 64 were only 0.8% higher in the first quarter of 2019 than they were in the first quarter of 2007, after accounting for inflation, according to a new analysis.

For comparison, earnings rose 4.7% during that same time for workers between the ages of 35 and 54.

Researchers say many older workers have little bargaining power in today’s economy.

Older workers have seen their wages come to a halt.

That’s the takeaway from a new report by researchers at the Retirement Equity Lab at the New School for Social Research.

Weekly earnings for workers aged 55 to 64 were only 0.8% higher in the first quarter of 2019 than they were in the first quarter of 2007, after accounting for inflation, they found. For comparison, earnings rose 4.7% during that same period for workers between the ages of 35 and 54.

As the wages of older workers peter out, the number of them in the workforce are only growing. Some 10,000 baby boomers turn 65 every day. More than half of the 11.4 million jobs expected to be added to the U.S. economy over the next seven years will be filled by workers over 55.

Why are these workers getting the short end of the stick?

“The main reason people working at older ages don’t have higher wages is because they don’t have bargaining power, and the reason they don’t have bargaining power is they don’t have a good fallback pension,” said Teresa Ghilarducci, an economics professor at the New School for Social Research.

“If everyone has a really secure pension plan, they can go to the labor market and bargain with employers,” she said.However, today less than half of older employees have access to a retirement plan though their job.Employers also exploit the fact that many older people can’t pack up and move across the country for different job opportunities, Ghilarducci said.

As a result, employers “can basically offer them just enough money to get them above the poverty line and they have to take it or leave it.”

Another problem? The growth of the gig economy, where wages are low and uncertain, and retirement plans basically are non-existent, Ghilarducci said.In 2015, nearly 25% of older workers said they were in an “alternative work arrangement,” defined as on-call, contract or gig work, up from 15% in 2005, the researchers at the New School found.What’s more, workers over the age of 55 are three times more likely than workers under 35 to be in alternative work arrangements.

Harry Campbell, the founder of TheRideshareGuy.com, surveyed more than 1,000 Uber and Lyft drivers last year. He found that 66 percent of them were over 50.Older drivers find it hard to plan for the future, he said.

“It’s a good job to help pay the bills but very difficult to save for big purchases like the house or retirement,” Campbell said.

A vicious cycle develops, in which older workers lack the retirement savings to negotiate better wages, and then the lower wages they pick up make it all that much harder for them to walk away from the workforce.

“More people will die in their boots,” Ghilarducci said. “They’ll never be able to retire.”

Of 11 "top" agencies, 3 did not have one person over 55

We looked at AdAge's 2019 Top Agencies and found that, while 55+ represented 19% of the total staff, 3 agencies had a grand total of 0 including, funny enough, Cashmere, AdAge's top multicultural agency of the year. Which only serves to remind us: Age is the last frontier, the forgotten minority.

If you'd like to see the rest (and they have even less, way less, people 55+) click here.

The agencies

If I didn't recognize any 55+ as being 55+, my apologies. If I said someone was (shudder!) 55+ and he/she wasn't... my apologies too, of course.

Of 17 people visibly over 55 from the 89 shown, McCann (my old Alma Mater along with FCB) accounted fully for 30%.

If you are an advertiser, why you should care about your agency's ageism practices

To read the article published in MW click the image

Discrimination against experienced older employees in ad land leads to missed opportunities and lost revenue. It’s high time the industry adopts a more mature approach.

By Ryan Wallman 15 Apr 2019 7:00 am

Alex Murrell, head of planning at Epoch Design, recently wrote an excellent article in which he compared the proportion of people aged over 50 in various industries. In fields such as science and law, he noted, the figure is more than 30%. In advertising? Just 6%, according to an IPA paper.

If you work in advertising and you’re over the age of 35, you can expect to be called ‘old’. Oh, OK, I’m exaggerating – it’s actually more like 30.

The demographic make-up of the advertising industry sends a pretty clear message to people who have the gall to a) stay alive and b) keep working past the age of 30. And that message is: “Fuck you and the mobility scooter you rode in on.”

Consider, for example, that consumers over 50 account for around 60% of all car sales. And yet when did you last see a car ad that didn’t feature attractive 20-somethings zipping around to an electropop soundtrack?

For some (if not most) brands, this is commercial insanity.

According to Gallop, ageist attitudes in the advertising industry – and in business more broadly – are particularly egregious towards women. This wouldn’t come as a shock to most people, given the low representation of women in senior roles and the apparently endemic culture of sexism at some agencies.